G4 - Realistic Interactive Reverb Processing for Games

Abstract:Realistic acoustics is essential for a realistic, immersive game experience. Computing and applying realistic acoustic responses for game scenes, called “interactive reverb,” is thus a very important problem. Most games today rely heavily on the audio designer to assess and apply the reverb parameters for different areas of a game scene. This manual process requires a lot of experience, expertise, and labor. Dynamic effects, such as the effect of source / listener positions, or changes in room geometry are almost always neglected.
Due to these reasons, a degree of automation and improvement in acoustic detail has long been needed for games. In the area of room acoustics, automatic calculation methods, as well as perceptual aspects of room responses have been (and continue to be) extensively studied. By utilizing reverb computation based on such techniques, along with artistic input from the audio designer, the quality of game reverb could be vastly improved. In this panel, three approaches for interactive reverb computation will be discussed: wave, geometrical and statistical acoustics. Panelists will discuss the technical aspects, relative strengths and weaknesses, performance requirements / tradeoffs and also show video demonstrations of the techniques in action. These approaches have been integrated with game engines and also map well to commodity multi-core processors.